Keele Research Repository

The overall objective of this research was to find out if there were student attitudes relevant to teaching, which were important to success in the training course as measured by final results, and which changed as the course progressed.
The central objective was therefore to examine a number of hypotheses about the attitudes of students in a College of Education. The most important of these hypotheses was to find out what attitudes students actually held towards basic features of the course, to see whether there were significant differences in attitude between different portions of each year group of the sample, and to see whether individual student attitudes changed during the course. In this way it was hoped to discover how far the attitudes which a student takes up in his first year are determinants of his success on the course, how far possible estrangement between tutorial and student attitudes increases the problem of communication, and how far student attitudes towards basic features of the course become more or less favourable as the course progresses. These 'basic features of the course' were determined by an assessment of the consensus of opinion among staff and third year students; and, as a result of this preliminary assessment, it was decided to investigate the five areas of (a) Attitude towards work (b) Attitude to authority (c) Attitude to one another (d) Attitude to children and (e) Attitude to life in general, which was based chiefly on the continuum of the progressive/conservative outlook of the student.